Radwa Rostom

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Ashoka Fellow

Cairo, Egypt, Middle East North Africa

Fellow Since 2016

Hand Over

Radwa is revolutionizing access to low- cost housing. Her approach combines innovation in design, construction, financing and community involvement to reduce residential construction costs by 50% or more. She is also changing mindsets towards building environmentally friendly houses by using local materials.

Citation

This profile was prepared when Radwa Rostom was elected to the Ashoka Fellowship in 2016.

The New Idea

In Egypt, there is a growing interest in using earth based materials in the Nile Delta for residential construction due to the abundance of resources such as soil, sand, gravel, etc. for the middle class population. However, until Radwa’s intervention, the cost of this type of construction was beyond the reach of more than 45% of the Egyptian population whose families live on income of $6 per day.

Radwa has implemented a low cost construction development process that produces buildings with the same structural integrity as buildings that are commercially available and meet all required codes for residential construction. Such implementation plays out four fold. She reaches out to undergraduates, recruits them, and trains them on building low-cost, socially and environmentally friendly housing units using participatory design approach and local construction materials. These students then listen to the needs of the community and start designing prototypes (following the municipality’s building codes) that are presented to the community for approval. At this point, private construction companies come in in order to provide technical and financial support. Radwa’s credit system does not only rely on these corporations, but also on multi-laterals (such as The World Bank) and micro-lending institutions.

She is not only using local materials, but also customizing these materials based on what is available in the community and what the needs of the people are through convening with them. She is employing sustainable construction techniques that promote the citizens’ participation in the building process through utilizing unconventional construction methods and local resources through enabling low-income families to design and construct their own houses.

Radwa’s construction model involves the creation of rooftop gardens, which offers basic agricultural products (fruits and vegetables), to not only encourage self-maintenance and self-sustenance, but also to economically empower the families.

As a result of this and a number of related improvements that Radwa has introduced, families earning as little as $6 per day can now qualify to have their houses rebuilt and repay their housing loans.

The Problem

Slums are characterized by poor quality housing, lack of adequate living spaces and impoverished living conditions including lack of basic urban services such as clean water, sanitation and electricity, all of which lead to extremely poor health and low levels of human capital.

In Egypt, a recent survey identified 1221 informal settlements in urban settlements. They are not part of local municipalities for planning and budgeting purposes. Families have lived in many of these “informal settlements” for generations.

Prior to Radwa’s intervention, settlement dwellers were unwilling to invest a substantial amount of money in the homes they built because they were built as temporary alternatives to what they had.

These settlements made of low quality construction were exposed to arbitrary eviction orders and forced removal in instances were government removed people to alternative areas that had been designed and built without consulting the people to be resettled first. The result was that dwellers moved back to the informal settlements. As an example, in some informal areas people need their animals to be near to them because they use them in their work. However, the new buildings that they were reallocated in were not animals-friendly most people would lose their work or, in reality, they would go back to their old slums in order not to lose their work and animals.

The Strategy

Radwa mobilizes and engages the community to become involved in the building process through establishing a network that links low-income families in slums and marginalized communities with key stakeholder groups, including local NGO’s, engineering students, private sector companies and governmental institutions.

Creating this network for her initiatives allows her to: 1) effectively lobby local officials for recognition of the permanence of the housing because it conforms to existing building codes and permits; 2) create humane housing that is affordable for low income families; and 3) provide engineering students (such as Ain Shams University and Cairo University) with sustainability education and design solutions for climate conditions in the Nile Delta.

Radwa documents every stage in the engagement processes and solutions, and then she shares them all with her partners. She is also training university students on participatory construction using earth based materials through participatory design curriculums sketched by Hand Over. In putting these students in contact with construction companies, she is creating a supply of talents familiar with the latest sustainable housing models. The latter as well as her financial viable model enable her sustain a network of professionals who permits the progress of her work.

Radwa finances 40% ($2.4k) of the cost of the housing unit (that she secures through CSR initiatives, funding organizations, and competitions) and the other 60% ($3.6k) is paid by the families through micro-lending institutions. This way the family can re-pay the loan in 3 years time given their daily income is $6/day. As a hybrid construction company, she is planning to provide housing units at higher pricing points for middle class families of $10/day, and use the profits to help finance the other projects for families with lower income levels.

The Person

Radwa was born in 1986 to an Egyptian family and was raised in Qatar where her father worked for the Ministry of Electricity. In Qatar, she attended international school. She returned to Cairo to pursue her construction engineering degree. At that time, she got involved in activities including teaching in informal settlements in Azbit Abu-Qarn on the suburbs of Cairo.

After university, she continued to volunteer in the informal settlement. In her first job, she was the lead structural engineer for construction projects (such as airports and shopping malls). She then moved to an environmental consulting firm, and at that time, she led a virtual volunteer team of teams project to design housing solutions after the 2012 Metro Manila Flooding.

In 2014, Radwa was granted a fellowship opportunity at the DO School in Hamburg, Germany. During the one-year fellowship, she pursued innovative housing solution that evolved in her current approach. Currently, Radwa has five projects in development — each of them is chosen to catalyze the spread of her participative housing approach to scale affordable housing utilizing earth based materials.

In December 2014, Radwa was selected as a young leader in Westerwelle foundation conference. She was recognized by Arabian Business Magazine as number 30 of the 100 most influential young Arabs under 40 in 2015 and 2016. In September 2015, she was awarded the wining prize for the “Women for Resilient Cities” Competition, organized by the World Bank and recently she was granted a fellowship from Echoing Green organization.